Release
by leaptad
Summary: A Doncentric character study. Set on the day of his mother's death.


The couch used to be in his parents bedroom. That was before his mom had come home and it had to be moved to make room for the hospital bed. Before feeding tubes and morphine drips, before hospice care. Before... well, before the whole world had come to an end.

It had been moved to the garage and now it was covered in old sheets and extra blankets and a grubby pillow. Don wondered how long it had been since any of it had been washed. He had been helping his father with the laundry the last few months and he knew he had never washed any of it. And God forbid Charlie lift a finger to help anyone but himself.

He stood in the entry way to the garage watching his brother Charlie, a mathematical genius, scribble frantically on blackboards. He had hung them from the walls, the ceiling, laid them on the floor. They covered every available surface, hanging from bent and misshapen nails that had never been seated properly. Charlie didn't even notice Don's presence. Or perhaps he didn't care to acknowledge it.

Don's hands shook. His stomach was a small, hard lump. His throat was tight. He watched his brother with a contempt that felt almost like hate. He was weak, pathetic, useless, pointless. His chalk moved endlessly, forming mathematical symbols some of which Don recognized. A sigma, a theta, a less-than sign. Don could no longer suffer the banality of it, the insignificance. His eyeballs throbbed as if the blood that rushed through his veins was literally trying to push them out of his skull.

He grabbed Charlie's hand and spun him around, slamming him against the blackboard. Charlie's head hit the hard surface with a satisfying crack. Don clenched the front of Charlie's sweatshirt in his fists and threw him backwards again. Charlie was like a rag doll. Limp, weak, defenseless.

He wished Charlie would fight back. Punch him, kick him, claw his eyes. He wanted to feel physical pain that matched his inner anguish.

He clutched his brother's shirt again and pulled Charlie to him, so close that their noses almost touched. Charlie's face was full of fear, his eyes bulging. Don's rage and hate consumed him.

"She's dead!" he bellowed, despite the fact that Charlie was less than an inch from him. "She's dead! She's gone! It's over!" He released Charlie with one hand and then stopped.

Don realized that his next move was about to be to punch Charlie square in the face. To feel the yielding of bone as it shattered, the warm trickle of blood over his knuckles. He dropped the arm that was already beginning to pull back to deliver the blow. His fist loosened. He forced the muscles in his shoulders and neck to relax. He finally released his brother.

Charlie slumped to the ground, tears streaming down his face. He had no right to cry for their mother. He hadn't been there. He hadn't seen. He hadn't watched her fade away until she looked like one of those photos of holocaust survivors. He hadn't been there that morning when she complained that she couldn't see or hear anymore. He hadn't heard the nurse say that it wouldn't be long now. He hadn't spent endless hours holding her hand, her skin as thin as tissue paper.

The rage once again boiled up like hot magma, and Don visualized himself kicking the shapeless mass that was his brother on the floor. Kicking him clear across the room. Breaking ribs. Beating him to a bloody mess.

But he didn't move, he just towered over Charlie quivering with rage. "You have no right!" he yelled. The voice he heard himself use was much higher than his own and cracked with tears. Tears he could no longer control. The man who hadn't cried since he was six years old, now did. A single tear squeezed out of the corner of his eyes and slid down his cheek. Even in that moment, Don could not allow himself to break down. He wiped it away with the back of his hand and breathed deeply to prevent any more.

His rage was gone. Vanished. All he felt for Charlie was pity. Charlie, who lived such a sheltered, perfect life. There was no pain in Charlie's world, no passion, no excitement, no wonder, no risk, and no reward. There were just numbers and signs and symbols and the sound of chalk scraping against slate. He doubted his brother had ever made love to a woman, ever watched helplessly as she got onto a bus and rode forever out of his life. So how could such a creature ever watch the demon of death pillage and plunder the human body? He imagined his brother as little more than a brain inside a jar, suspended in a strange green solution that allowed him to think but never feel.

"Get up," Don ordered under his breath. His voice had returned to its normal register. "Get up," he repeated, louder. "Get the hell up and come inside."

He turned and walked out of the garage and into the house. His father was standing in the kitchen with the phone in his hand. "Yes," his father was saying. "That's right. So when will you come to pick up the body?"

He heard the soft waver in his father's voice, imperceptible to those who had not sat next to him night after night listening to the shallow labor of his mother's breathing. Wishing for her to live. Praying for her to die that this all might end. And hoping that somehow, someday, somewhere, he might know even a fraction of the love that his father and mother shared.


End file.
